


i took it with me (forgive me)

by theseourbodies



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Gen, mention of past injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:59:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8450863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: All the simple liberties Steve takes with Danny all the time, but this is the most intimate situation he thinks they’ve ever been in.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set in season 4 or 5, it's relatively important to the story that Danny is living in an actual house 
> 
> Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone

There’s a new, beautiful potted palm cheerfully waving its long fronds at Steve from Danny’s front patio, and Steve doesn’t resist the urge to run his fingers along the center of one strong frond as he passes it to get to the door. Danny can bitch all he wants about the native greenery of the island, but he can’t hide how well tended all of his plants and trees—potted, like the palm, or not, like the flowering plumeria peeking around the house—always are. Grinning, Steve has just stepped away from the palm when the door opens before he can even reach for his copy of Danny’s house key. 

Steve’s smile is just a little helplessly fond as Grace quietly waves at him from the doorway. She rubs her eyes sleepily as she grins at him, relaxed and, Steve is convinced, a little taller than when he saw her last.  
“Hey Uncle Steve,” she murmurs. She doesn’t ask him why the hell he’s on her daddy’s front porch, stroking his new plant, which he’s infinitely grateful for, just says, quietly, “You can come in but you have to be, like, ninja quiet. Danno’s asleep.” Judging by the way Grace is still trying to rub the sleep from her eyes, Danny wasn’t the only one until a very little while ago—Steve smiles sheepishly, hoping he wasn’t the one who woke her.

“Of course, I just wanted to stop by, drop some stuff off.” He instinctively mimics the level of her voice, keeping the conversation low; he does actually have some stuff to drop off in a file tucked under an arm, but it was mostly non-urgent forms, statements he needed Danny to witness or sign himself. Even he could admit to himself that it was a thin excuse at best, but Danny wouldn’t have said anything, just rolled his eyes and let Steve follow him into the kitchen for a good beer and a portion of whatever Danny and Grace were cooking up for dinner.

Thankfully he doesn’t have to hit the road right away; Grace is still sleepy-eyed, but she grins like she knows what he’s thinking and leaves the door open for him to close as she does just as her daddy would have, leads the way into the kitchen—though she quietly offers him some of the protein drink she had just mixed instead of a beer, with a little smirk. She has almost nothing of Danny in her but the parts that count, Steve thinks—her complicated expressions, her easy humor, her inner strength. Taking the offered drink, he quietly hopes that Danny sees it, too.

“Since Danno isn’t up, do you want to go for a run with me? Just a couple miles, and he’ll be awake by then.” Grace sounds like she’s speaking from experience, but with every passing mention of Danny—paranoid father of the year, king of the any-where, any-time catnap—being sound asleep in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday was starting to freak Steve out just a little. Danny’s freakish ability to nap easily and anywhere was the envy of almost everyone on the team, but the more that Grace talked about it, the more it sounded like the heavy sleeping Danny usually reserved for when the job was done and he could collapse into bed—the kind of sleep that Steve personally thought was dangerous as hell, deep and difficult to drag yourself out of.

Steve agrees to the run almost without a second thought—he’s dressed well enough for it, in his own kickaround shorts and his favorite cut off, possibly chosen for this outing precisely so Steve could see the pissy face Danny gets when he knows people, _professionals_ that he and Danny _work with_ , have seen Steve. When Grace—moving much quicker now that she had woken up a little more—bounces off to change into her running wear, Steve wanders over to Danny’s bedroom doorway, because dammit, he’d been looking forward to that particular expression on Danny’s face. 

He’s not that worried. Really.

It turns out Danny is really asleep. Steve freezes in the doorway as he takes in the room, Danny sprawled out on his back, knee propped up carefully on a low pile of cushions. One of Danny’s hands is curled around the cover of one of the trashy detective novels Steve knows he loves—Steve can’t read the title, but RICHARD CASTLE is emblazoned across the front. Any other day and Steve would save that little fact for some friendly ribbing later on. Any other day…

Danny’s not facing the door, but Steve knows how his partner looks when he sleeps, and he’s obscurely grateful he doesn’t have to see Danny’s soft, lax face juxtaposed against the neat line of three orange pill bottles and an empty glass on the nightstand and the crisply wrapped ice pack leaving a wet mark on the white bedspread next to Danny’s knee. Suddenly, the room feels very small, the later-afternoon light too soft. There are all these things that Steve does, all the liberties that he takes with Danny—the copy of Danny’s key on Steve’s key ring, stepping in on Danny’s days with Grace, the car, the job, all of it—and yet this feels like too much, too intimate for Steve to be stepping in on. Steve is backing away before he fully registers the movement, snagging the doorknob on the way out to close it part way behind him so that no one else can intrude on Danny, looking bizarrely small and fragile on his big white bed.

Steve doesn’t let himself think about it until he and Grace are on their way; she settles into her rhythm quickly, and he sets a pace to match hers, and as he runs he lets himself just let his thoughts roll out like the pavement under his feet.

All of the blood and pain he’s spilled on his partner, all the casual little pieces of Steve that Danny has collected over the years—the small pieces that help make the whole picture of the man Steve is—and Steve is suddenly very aware that there are pieces of Danny that Steve has never seen before, has never been able to collect himself. Danny’s initial issues with his ACL had been noted in his medical file, which Steve had, of course, checked with the rest of the team’s back when there had only been four of them, all rough and ready and still trying to figure one another out. The attending physician on the initial injury had been from Newark, but Steve had never actually talked to Danny about it; he’d made his jokes, made sure Danny was on what Chin had later drily dubbed ‘double secret light duty,’ and waited patiently for the cane to disappear again. Danny had never made any excuses about it—when he needed a cane, he needed it, and Steve always got a snide text about it before Danny showed up for work.

He doesn’t know how it had _happened_ , though, and he certainly had never thought to ask Danny—or Kono, he realizes belatedly—about whether there were days without the cane that still hurt. Steve certainly hadn’t been able to tell on Friday, when he had seen Danny last, that anything was wrong and that… that makes something clench in his gut, a tight little ball of anger and fear and a strange sadness.

Here he is, running beside Danny’s daughter, who he has known since she was barely up to his knee, running the neighborhood he and his team had helped Danny pick out, running back to the house where Danny was waiting, knocked out with the good drugs and an inflamed knee that Steve, his partner Steve, hadn’t realized was bothering him.

Here he is, with questions to ask still and a new world of simple, small things he doesn’t know about Danny Williams. Steve takes his discomfort all the way back to Danny’s front door, dutifully locked behind Steve and Grace when they had left. The silence of Danny’s house has been busted apart—there’s low music coming from the stereo next to the TV, and from the kitchen he can hear Danny’s scratchy tenor following the lyrics dutifully. Grace calls a greeting while Steve quietly tries to _get himself together_ amidst the joyous reunion of father and child. The Danny that peeks out of the kitchen to check on Steve is still sleep soft, hair bouncing a little more than usual, but if there’s any part of him that hurts he doesn’t show it. “You here to stare at my charming décor or steal my beer?” Danny asks with that lazy smile Steve’s only ever seen in this house--this house that Steve and the team helped him find. Steve can’t see from here, but he imagines that Danny’s little row of pill bottles are now safely stowed away, the ice pack disposed of and its wrap in the hamper. No evidence, no weakness, no quarter asked or given—that had been Danny since the day he had punched Steve in the face, since that first case together.

And maybe that’s the point, Steve thinks as he summons up a smile of his own, maybe he does have enough of Danny, the best parts that Danny picked for him especially. Maybe from now on Steve just needs to look out for the moments that he gets to see Danny like earlier that afternoon, those moments made available because of all the other things that Danny has allowed him to have—his open door, his loving family, and his easy smile.

**Author's Note:**

> It occurs to me that I do not in fact know if potted palms are a thing in Hawai'i. Sorry if they're not, that's my bad.


End file.
